That’s correct @Mattches. I am in the United Kingdom. I know that there must be active campaigns for ads other than the sponsored images, because I get them on my iPhone and my Android phone. But I have a work mac and a personal mac, (one on Catalina and one on Big Sur) and neither of these have had a single notification ad popup since I installed the browser.
Since I felt that this thread was resolved as I started once again seeing the sponsored images, i decided to create a new thread for the notifications issue: MacOS Notifications have never worked